Ed Dames, Remote Viewing Legend

I got the news Wednesday night, April 1st. Despite the date, I knew it was no joke. Ed Dames’ media producer and manager, Nick Westerlund, called to tell me that Ed had passed away. It had probably happened the previous Friday night but, sadly, he wasn’t found until Sunday. The news of Ed’s passing had not yet been made public, Nick said. Ed had suffered a stroke about six months prior, and from all appearances another one had done him in.

As I told Nick and, a few minutes later, Tom Danheiser, the producer for Coast to Coast AM, while Ed and I disagreed about many things, I still very much enjoyed him on a personal level. So it was sad to hear he was gone. I won’t dwell on the end of his life—I want to tell you a little about the Ed Dames I knew. I’ll (mostly) leave our disagreements out of it.

For context, Ed and I met in December, 1983, a story I’ll tell shortly. We spent much of 1984 together being trained in remote viewing.In early 1986, Ed joined us in the Star Gate program¹ as a monitor and project officer, and later—after Capt. Skip Atwater’s departure—for a short time as training and operations officer. Ed left Star Gate towards the end of 1988, and when he created his company Psi-Tech in 1989, I was there at the founding meeting. Over the years from when I returned from Desert Storm in mid 1991 until February 1997, I worked numerous remote viewing targets for him. We last met in person at the 2007 Remote Viewing conference in Las Vegas.

Our first meeting had happened in December 1983. My commander was sending me to the Monroe Institute for a special version of its Gateway Program. Ed’s own unit had decided he should go along as well. Here is how I remember Ed from our first encounter, standing there next to the bus [this and some of the other stories I’ll tell are excerpted from my book Reading the Enemy’s Mind]²:

[Ed] was dressed as the rest of us in civilian clothes, with sandy hair cropped short. He later admitted that he often trimmed his bangs himself, and so it looked on this occasion. Ed had penetrating eyes that often crinkled at the edges in amusement. One quickly stopped noticing the details, though, since his confidence and chutzpah soon had one wrapped up in his lively persona. He was an odd combination of single-mindedness and sardonic humor. One moment he could be gravely assuring you that the Soviets were likely to unleash vile biological weapons any minute now, and the next moment be making a rude or irreverent joke at the expense of some current military or cultural Sacred Cow. I liked him immediately. [143]

We ended up seat mates on the bus from Fort Meade, MD down to the Monroe Institute’s home near Charlottesville, Virginia. During that memorable ride, Ed started off telling me about his own personal history:

Back in the early 1970s, Ed had been an enlisted soldier in Taiwan, working as a Morse code intercept operator for the Army Security Agency -– a “ditty-bopper,” in the slang of the Army intelligence community. Morse interceptors spent their days sitting at radio receivers, listening through headphones to long-wave Morse-code radio broadcasts that were the workhorse communications for both low-tech armies and for guerilla groups trying to stay incognito. Ditty-boppers had a reputation for working long, monotonous shifts, listening to streams of dits and dahs coming through their headsets for hours, copying transcriptions of the code onto hulking old manual typewriters. They worked that way for days, stretching into months and years until finally, stark-raving mad, they would leap screaming from their chairs and hurl their typewriters through the closest available window, or so the stories went. Legend had it that there were whole psychiatric wards of ditty-boppers lounging around in strait-jackets. [143-144]

Ed managed to avoid that outcome. He married a Taiwanese woman, left the Army at the end of his enlistment and enrolled in college at Berkeley, majoring in chemistry and minoring in Chinese. As I went on to learn during that long bus ride, Ed became fluent in Mandarin—which will shortly be relevant—thanks to his Army language experience, marriage partner, and education.

Ed also enrolled in ROTC and, upon graduation was commissioned a second lieutenant in military intelligence and sent to be a staff officer in a tank battalion in Germany. No matter what their specialty, junior officer always have extra duties. One of these was range officer when the tanks went for gunnery practice. One story Ed told me during that bus ride happened one night on the firing range while he was standing on the fender of an M-60 tank. Other tanks were lined up fender-to-fender on either side.

Tank treads had churned the ground into a gooey sea of knee deep mud. Except for the muzzle flashes, tracer rounds, and guttering aerial flares, it was pitch dark in the pouring rain…Ed turned to step across to the next tank, when suddenly, the one he was on lurched. The lieutenant lost his balance and tumbled into the two-foot space separating the tank and its neighbor. Landing on his back between two 60-ton steel behemoths, he found he was trapped. [145]

The deep mud kept him from leaping to his feet in the narrow space, and if he rolled over he would end up in the treads of vehicles on either side. The tanks were gunning their engines, about to lurch forward. Ed screamed. “Don’t move the tank!” but the roaring engines and crashing main guns drowned him out. He screamed again. “Don’t move the tank!” even though he knew it was hopeless. Ed was about to be torn to shreds. He knew he was going to die. But just then

… a sergeant happened to glance down between the two tanks and thought he saw something. Peering closer, he saw Ed floundering, half-buried in the mud. “What the hell are you doing down there, Lieutenant?” he bellowed and, reaching down, grabbed Ed by the front of his field jacket and dragged him back aboard. [145]

If it weren’t for that unnamed sergeant, remote viewing history would have been much different. And then, for the rest of our bus ride, Ed talked about UFOs.

Ed was very persuasive. He exuded confidence, seemed knowledgeable, and hinted at insider access to some of the details. I later found that what he was telling me as we rode south on Route 29 through Virginia was mostly the standard cases that were being noised around the UFO community at the time [though they were much less well known than they are today]. But he seemed well versed, and he told his stories in a way that made sense and hung together. By the time we pulled up to the front of the Monroe Institute and the bus doors sprang open, he hadn’t convinced me about UFOs, but he had persuaded me that I ought to take some of the reports more seriously. [146]

UFOs continued to be important to Ed throughout the rest of his life.

Once the week at the Monroe Institute was over, we rode another bus back to Fort Meade and parted company. But we were back together the very next month.

I had joined the Star Gate Program on September 1, 1983, just over three months before our Monroe Institute adventure. Two others, Capt. Bill Ray, Department of the Army Civilian Charlene Cavenaugh and myself were to start our remote viewing training at SRI-International in Menlo Park, California. Our instructor would be remote viewing’s creator, Ingo Swann, along with SRI’s remote viewing program director, Dr. Harold E. “Hal” Puthoff.

At first it was going to be just the three of us. But Ed Dames’ unit found some extra training funds and talked our headquarters into adding him to the contract. Starting the second week in January, the four of us spent the rest of 1984 together, two weeks training with SRI, either in California or in its offices in Manhattan, alternating with two weeks back home at Fort Meade. I kept a detailed journal that year. But we had too many adventures during that year to tell them all here. I’ll mention just a few.

One adventure involved a Chinese restaurant, a snooty waitress, and Ed Dames. We were training in New York that time, and our boss, Lieutenant Colonel Brian Buzby had come to the city with Tom McNear, who

had started his own remote viewing education many months before we did. The two were interested to see how our training was coming. For lunch break we went to a nearby Chinese restaurant.

As we entered, the staff could see there were too many of us for their usual arrangement. They started pushing tables together and rearranging chairs. The head waitress came in and noticed what was going on. She started complaining loudly in Chinese about those arrogant, entitled Americans! They always wanted things their own way; how inconsiderate they were; they had no hesitation about inconveniencing others; and so on. In a low voice Ed translated for us the gist of what she said.

But when she approached the table notepad in hand, she was all smiles. She turned to Ed. “What would you like to order?” she calmly asked. Ed opened the menu and responded in clear Mandarin. Abruptly realizing that he had understood every word of her previous tirade, the waitress froze as the color drained from her face. She straightened up, flipped the cover over her notepad, clicked her pen, turned quickly and fled mortified through the kitchen doors. Garbled conversation drifted back to us, and for the rest of the meal other members of the wait staff served us. The food was quite tasty.

At the end of May, Ed skipped out during one of our training weeks in New York to hurry home for the birth of his son Aaron. Ed now had two sons—Enoch, the oldest—and they were the light of his life. Ed could not have been a prouder dad.

The four of us often socialized with Ingo after work hours in New York. Ingo fancied himself a gourmet cook, and he was not wrong. After a delicious meal, we would sometimes sit around in his apartment on the top floor of the building he owned and look out on downtown Manhattan. In the deepening gloom behind the skyline outside Ingo’s windows, we would sit in conversation. It turned out that Ingo and Ed shared a love of expensive wine. As the evening wore on their tongues got looser, and their conversation waxed metaphysical, until soon the two of them were the only ones talking.

Our training with SRI finished in December 1984. Ed went back to his unit, and we saw him only infrequently when he would stop by to chat. During this time the Army decided to end its involvement with Star Gate. A year-long transition period followed, through all of 1985. On January 31, 1986, our unit became part of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Simultaneously, Ed Dames finally joined us formally for the next three years. He was not assigned to be a remote viewer. Rather, Ed functioned as a remote viewing monitor, project manager, and as helper to Skip Atwater in managing the remote viewing practice and training.

Still more adventures ensued. Most involved conventional (if there can be such a thing) remote viewing work. But Ed’s passion for UFOs emerged as well. Since real remote viewing requires that the viewer be fully blind to the nature and identify of the target, viewers are at the mercy of their taskers—which in this case was often Ed Dames.

It was not unusual to go into the operations building to be tasked and monitored by Ed, thinking that we would be working on some real-world intelligence collection project. Then, later, we would discover that he had instead assigned us to work one or another of his pet UFO projects.

At the time we mostly found it aggravating. Here we had spent an hour or more of our time thinking we were contributing to national security, only to discover that we were really remote viewing a target for which there was no objective evidence. Even worse, no useful feedback was available to tell us what we had gotten right and what wrong. So our efforts didn’t even produce any real training value.

I am now somewhat grateful for those experiences. In light of recent reports on UFOs (now called UAPs) some of Ed’s passion seems to be vindicated—even if only in a few particulars. And there was further benefit of sorts. Ed’s monitoring style and love of hyperbole set things up for the best-ever remote viewing practical joke. You can read about it here, in what I have come to think of as “the great Santa Claus caper.”

Something else for which I am grateful to Ed involved another remote viewing he tasked and monitored me on—even if accidentally—the precognitive session I did that predicted and described the attack on the

USS Stark in May,1987, fifty hours before the attack took place. It’s a long tale, and I’ve told it numerous times elsewhere. Since this article is about Ed, I’ll only make that mention here. [303-312]

Ed left the Star Gate Program at the end of 1988 to go to another, even more secret assignment. Just as before he joined our unit, I only saw him occasionally when he stopped in for a visit. That is, until sometime in mid-1989, when Ed invited me over, along with my fellow Star Gate viewers Mel Riley, and Dave Morehouse to discuss the founding of his company, Psi Tech. [425] Ed intended the new company to act as an unclassified channel to move remote viewing into the civilian world. Technically, remote viewing itself was not classified—only the link to the Department of Defense was. Buchanan, Riley and myself were at first hired on as employees. When it became obvious that corporations were not rushing to hire Psi Tech, we became independent contractors.

My first remote viewing assignment from Psi Tech didn’t come until1991, when I was back from Desert Storm but still at Fort Campbell, KY. The Psi Tech mission was to try to locate weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Over the next six years, I worked numerous remote viewing projects for Ed Dames and Psi Tech. Targets included the cause of the explosion of TWA 800 over Long Island Sound, the future course of the ozone hole in Earth’s atmosphere (which I correctly predicted), something involving future automotive technology, and still others that I have yet to learn the identity of—and now probably never will. [425-428]

My final remote viewing assignment for Psi Tech was in February of 1997. Ed first had me remote view the Hale-Bopp comet, which I did, not knowing it was the target. I thought it was odd that all I got was bright billowy clouds. But then he wanted me to remote view what was inside it. It was what amounted to a fishing expedition, and I was not happy with the tasking. I chose not to do it [460-461]. At that point I had retired from the Army and just opened my own remote viewing training company. I branched out on my own.

Ed continued to be a thread through my life—not in person, but in his ever growing presence in the media world. We were always getting word of or listening in to radio and TV shows he was on. His biggest boost came from Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM late-night radio show. I often say that Art Bell made Ed Dames famous, and Ed did the same for Art. There was a symbiotic relationship between the two as Ed added appearance after appearance on Art’s program, raising Coast to Coast’s audience-share into the stratosphere, until it reached a claimed 50 million listeners a night.

There were also the documentaries. I recall Ed inviting me and some of the other Star Gate viewers to interview for an episode of a paranormal-oriented series playing on TV at the time. And in one episode on another program he displayed some of the remote viewing pen-and-ink sketches I had made for a Psi Tech project.

Ed was now enthusiastically promoting his reputation as “Dr. Doom”—widely-listened-to predictor of pending Earth disasters and the end of the world as we know it. He claimed to have gotten his knowledge of these catastrophes from remote viewing. I disapproved of the way he painted remote viewing in the media. And his on-air doom-saying seemed to me but an extension and expansion of what he had treated us to ten years before in Star Gate.

I didn’t see him again in person until the 2007 Remote Viewing Conference, sponsored by the International Remote Viewing Association (IRVA). His manager approach me about having him be one of the speakers, and as president of IRVA I agreed. He was a major force in the burgeoning remote viewing community, and I knew that many IRVA members would be eager to hear Ed talk.

I was surprised when we first came together at how quickly the old rapport kicked in. Our long friendship still had a heart beat. I still felt that camaraderie, and his jokes still amused.

Just as interesting was to see how he switched personas when it was time to become Dr. Doom. He played to his fans almost as if he were a different Ed Dames. Yet you could see a little of each Ed in the other. He

ended his performance with a ribald limerick he had composed about IRVA. Some folks were offended. I was annoyed. But it was quintessential Ed Dames.

And, though I had serious issues with how he presented our discipline, I always readily admit that it was Ed who really thrust remote viewing into public awareness. Short in stature, he was huge in personality and chutzpah. No claim was too big for him to make, and there was no remote viewing story that could ever be made too exciting. No question: When remote viewing burst into the public’s imagination in 1996 and 1997, it was Ed who made the explosion massive. And he kept the heat turned up for years, bringing remote viewing into the consciousness of ever greater numbers of devotees. For that alone, Ed deserves his reputation as a legend.

1. At the time, the remote viewing program was actually called “Center Lane,” one of several different nicknames it was known by over the 18 years the military program was in existence. For simplicity, I will just use “Star Gate” here, since that is the umbrella name it has become known by.
2. The numbers in brackets following passages in this article refer to the 2005 hardback edition of Reading the Enemy’s Mind, where you can read more about Ed Dames and the Star Gate Program.